How Effective are Policy Interventions in a Spatially-Embedded International Real Estate Market?

Mamata Parhi, Tapas Mishra, Kun Duan, Simon Wolfe

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    Abstract

    We introduce the role of ‘space’ in analysing the effect of macroeconomic policy interventions on cross-country housing price movements. We build an empirically testable analytical model and test our theoretical predictions for a panel of European countries over the period 1985-2015. Our aim is to demonstrate that while macroeconomic policy exerts a significant impact on international housing markets, the magnitude of such impacts may be overestimated in the absence of spatial frictions. To test our hypotheses, we employ a spatial dynamic panel method and quantify intra- and inter-country differences of the effects of macroeconomic policy interventions on spatially interdependent housing markets. Endogeneity issues arise in our estimation,
    which we ameliorate by employing the spatial Durbin model for panel data. Following this approach, we include spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal lags for identification purposes. We show that a spatially-embedded model produces relatively smaller and correct signs for macroeconomic variables in contrast to the traditional non-spatial model. It is concluded that empirical estimates from the traditional model are consistently over-estimated. These have significant
    policy implications for the exact role of macroeconomic interventions in housing price movements. A battery of robustness tests and evaluations of predictive performance confirm our results.
    our results.

    This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in The Journal or Real Estate Finance and Economics. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11146-018-9654-3.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)596–637
    JournalJournal of Real Estate Finance and Economics
    Volume58
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 22 Feb 2018

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